In the immediate aftermath of World War II, American occupation forces in Germany had gathered a great deal of valuable information from former Nazis with special knowledge of communist Russia, such as Reinhard Gehlen, who had been Hitler’s chief of military intelligence on the eastern front. By the summer of 1946, the War Department was systematically spiriting away to the United States Germans who had desirable
“technical” expertise (and, often, terrible records as war criminals) in a secret operation code-named “Paperclip.”1 Kennan and his fellow interventionists now advocated taking a similar approach to the many thousands of eastern-bloc citizens who were either crowded into prisoner of war (POW) and displaced person (DP) camps in Germany or scattered around various western capitals: captured Russian soldiers who had fought with the Nazis against their own communist government, refugees from Baltic and Balkan territories “liberated” by the Soviets, and disillusioned ex-communist intellectuals. As well as being exploitable for intelligence purposes, this drifting, desperate population could be deployed in anti-Soviet political warfare operations, both paramilitary and psychological. The mere fact of the presence in the west of these political refugees
30
S E C R E T A R M Y
testified to the hatefulness of communist rule and the possibility of escape from it.
How, though, to harness this “potential secret army?” Various suggestions were considered. Kennan proposed the creation of a political warfare school to train exiles in “air support, communications, local security, counter-intelligence, foraging, sabotage, guerrilla tactics, field medicine, and propaganda.” Two veterans of the OSS, Stanford-educated guerrilla specialist Franklin Lindsay and State Department-trained Sovietologist Charles Thayer, came up with a plan “to extract for U.S. advantage disaffected foreign nationals from Soviet-dominated areas.” Shortly before taking over the Office of Policy Coordination, Frank Wisner, who had toured German DP camps in 1947 while working for the State Department, led a high-level study group investigating the “Utilization of Refugees from USSR in U.S. National Interests.” When the group reported in May 1948, it made particular play of the exiles’ “fortitude in the face of Communist menace” and know-how “in techniques to obtain control of mass movements,” including “Socialist, trade union, intellectual, moderate right-wing groups, and others.” Wisner wanted to see the relaxation of U.S. immigration controls and a secret government disbursement of $5
million to expedite the recruitment of these “natural antidotes to Communism.” The resulting program, Operation Bloodstone, echoed its predecessor Paperclip by admitting a number of war criminals. As Harry Rositzke, a Soviet expert in the CIA, explained, “It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-communist.”2
The employment of such elements in intelligence-gathering and paramilitary operations was clearly something that had to be done secretly.
Psychological warfare, however, was a different matter. Inspiring resistance within the “captive” populations of the eastern bloc and demoralizing the communist leadership were goals that could only be achieved with public pronouncements by anticommunist exiles. The problem was how to lend support to such exiles without at the same time discrediting them by making them look like American agents. The answer lay in Kennan’s May 1948 memorandum on political warfare: the formation of “a public American organization” to “sponsor selected political refugee committees” that would receive “covert guidance” and “assistance” from the government.3 In addition to providing U.S. officials with the ability to deny plausibly that they were subverting a foreign government in peacetime,
É M I G R É S
31
this stratagem would have the advantages of creating the impression of voluntary humanitarianism among American citizens and, at the same time, helping educate the U.S. public in the moral issues of the Cold War.